


Foyleside Shopping Centre Presents: Derry Grrrls!

by unimole



Category: Derry Girls (TV)
Genre: F/F, Fake Dating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:00:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25943980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unimole/pseuds/unimole
Summary: What better way to steal a very cool musician's heart than to start a riot grrrl band?What better way to accidentally have your heart stolen than to engage in a semi-complicated fake dating scheme with one of your best friends?
Relationships: Clare Devlin/Erin Quinn
Comments: 21
Kudos: 53
Collections: CAILURE EXCHANGE 2020





	Foyleside Shopping Centre Presents: Derry Grrrls!

**Author's Note:**

> FOR #13
> 
> I realize that you did not ask for a weird Battle of the Bands conceit, but I hope you don't mind it and its accompanying small piece of crab-themed stupid lyrics too much. Happy Cailure, bb! :D

“Look here, look at this!”

With a loud smack and a theatrical flourish, Erin slammed a poster down into the middle of the Quinn kitchen table, so violently even Orla began to blanch before catching herself. Some plaster was affixed to the tape on one side of the paper and one of the corners had been ripped off — Erin had torn the poster down from the wall she found it on with only a moderate amount of care — and whenever she managed to keep one side of it flat, the other one would seem to curl up and roll towards her, undulating on the entirely static table with a particularly irritating dynamism.

“A little help?” she requested of the room at large. James actively leaned away from the table, his eyebrows knitting together over the bridge of his nose in confusion, but Michelle thankfully stepped up to the plate and pinned the far side of the poster down with the full length of her arm.

“Battle of the Bands,” read Clare, now that the text wasn’t shimmying away beneath the writhing paper. Erin looked at it, and at Clare, triumphantly. “Cash prizes. Amateurs welcome. Rules in small print.”

"That's why you asked us to come over?” said James, leaning back toward the poster with heavily telegraphed incredulity. “That's the emergency?"

“That’s the emergency, aye. We need to join, girls.”

Erin’s face was all business. Michelle squinted at the poster.

“Cash prizes, you say?" Her squint dissolved into a smile, her interest clearly piqued. "Sick. All bonbons in my pick and mix from now on. If you know what I mean.”

Though her voice was dense with innuendo and her eyebrows leapt up and down like semaphores, her contribution passed without remark or request for clarification.

“The poster says dollar sign, dollar sign, dollar sign,” Clare said, prodding her index finger at the poster three times for emphasis, jabbing each symbol. “How do you know the cash prizes are in sterling?”

“Well, if it’s dollars, we’ll just go to America, won’t we?" Michelle, thankfully, would not be daunted. "We could visit Rachel, you know, my second cousin.”

“Are we allowed to go to America if there’s not a famine on?”

Everyone turned to look at Orla for the obligatory second before ignoring her, too, and turning back to the poster.

“They’re probably not going to give out American dollars in a competition sponsored by the Foyleside Shopping Centre,” said James.

“Oh, yeah, good call. Probably just shitty vouchers, then.”

The look on Michelle's face was steadily moving back toward dubious, but Orla looked surprisingly animated at the clearly false spectre of gift cards: “I’d take a voucher,” she said. Erin wasn’t sure what kind of voucher she was dreaming of and frankly she did not want to know.

“But it says _cash_ prizes,” Clare said in a voice approaching a whine.

Sometimes, Erin thought, her friends were too much by half.

“Focus, would you?” She twisted her neck around the room, staring down each of the girls in turn. “We’re not in it for the cash. We’re in it because David Donnelly is competing and that’s how I’ll win his _heart._ "

There was a protracted silence. A generally unimpressed silence, if Erin were forced to try to characterise its tenor.

“You want us to take part in a weird music-and-dance mall show so that you can make cow-eyes at that creep Donnelly,” Michelle summed it up.

“He’s not a creep!”

“And you want us to get paid in vouchers for the trouble.”

“Could really do with a voucher...” Orla, again.

"A cash prize isn't going to be _vouchers_ , Michelle," Erin felt compelled to interject.

"Anyway," Michelle went in, ignoring Erin's input, "I thought he'd declared you a no-bone-zone after the Katya fiasco."

"He may have distanced himself from me somewhat," Erin admitted though she didn't like doing so, "but that's exactly why we need to do this. So I can un-distance him."

"And for the vouchers," Orla insisted.

“I really don’t think this is is a good idea.” The pitch of Clare’s voice rose by the word, as did the speed of the sentence tumbling out of her mouth. "Quite frankly, I think it's a dumb idea. A ridiculous idea. Since when have you been interested in music, Erin?"

“Well, you never think anything is a good idea, Clare!” Erin couldn’t help but snap. “You’d think the idea of using your own two feet to walk sounded just a wee bit dubious if the suggestion came from me.”

“I’m with Clare, actually.” James paused for effect. “Do you lot even play any instruments? You don't, do you?”

And, after some harsh words and some hastily improvised and quickly pitched projectiles, that’s how it was decided that the Derry girls were taking part in Foyleside Shopping Centre Presents!: Battle of the Bands 1995.

* * *

“All right.”

Erin had once more commandeered the editor’s room of _The Habit_ , still left unused after the 'young lesbian' debacle — Louise Kerr had neither died nor improved enough to return to school and Erin had reluctantly decided that her writing talents may hew closer to fiction than to hard-hitting journalism. Still, the fact that nobody had returned to the room made it excellent headquarters for Battle of the Bands scheming. Erin knocked her piece of chalk against the blackboard, staring imperiously at James when the resultant dust made him cough. Well, two could play that game: she coughed, too, to make sure attention was on her.

"First order of business: Who’s pro-covers?” Another knock. “And who’s against?”

“We can’t do fecking covers if we want to look sound.” Michelle slung her long legs up on the desk in front of her. “Jenny Joyce and her gang of twats are competing and you know what they’re like. There’ll be medleys and all sorts.”

“But are we even any good at writing songs?” James saw fit to ask.

“Well,” Erin said, swelling up with pride as her mind raked over all her myriad poetic talents. “I’ve been known to—”

“You tried to rhyme ‘grudge’ with ‘bridge’ in English class the other week,” Clare interrupted. Quite unhelpfully, in Erin’s opinion.

“It was a _slant_ rhyme.”

“Oh, is that right? Was ‘bad’ and ‘forbade’ a slant rhyme, too?”

Erin didn’t understand why Clare was being so difficult. Frowning, she determined to ignore her and barreled on instead, drawing squiggles on the board.

“Anyway, James doesn’t get a vote.” She turned to James: “You don’t get a vote. You’re not even in the band.”

“I’m not in the band!” Despite the fact that he’d been vocally against the idea from the start, James looked infuriated. “What are you trying to say?”

“She’s trying to say, No dicks allowed, dick,” Michelle answered in Erin’s stead.

“But the poster says five or more members. Look!”

They all gathered around.

“Well, what kind of rule is that?”

“I suppose he can be like your man in The Corrs. The one who stands in the back.”

“The one with the unfortunate hairline?”

“That’s the one.”

Four sets of eyes converged on James’s forehead.

“Would you _mind_?”

“I suppose it’ll have to do.”

“Top.”

“I feel like we’re losing focus, girls,” Erin said as James plastered his hands across his face, fingers scrabbling in the edges of his hair. “James’s hairline is not on the agenda. Covers is. Covers are?" She shook her head, refusing to get bogged down in the sometimes unclear waters of subject-verb agreement. "Are we writing our own songs? Show of hands.”

Erin hoisted her own hand proudly and without hesitation, as did Michelle — you could count on Michelle, Erin thought to herself. Maybe not to be tactful in delicate situations or to not try her hardest to aggravate Clare, but you could count on her where it mattered. Clare's own hand, meanwhile, was hovering somewhere around her midriff, probably so she'd be able to claim either side after seeing the lay of the land. Oh yes, Erin knew all her tricks. Orla was fiddling with something in her pocket; Erin chose to count that as her abstaining. Only James seemed to be squarely in the corner of covers.

"Four against one," proclaimed Erin, "well, that's settled, then—"

"Just wait a minute. It's not four against one! Clare's not…" James looked over at Clare, but unfortunately for him she'd chosen to join the winning side and was thrusting her hand in the air higher than anyone. "Okay, but Orla's not voting yes."

"Will we do choreography?" Orla asked when the room's attention settled on her. She gazed toward the tall window on the far wall with her slightly vacant Orla gaze like she thought she might be able to look through the drawn curtain. "The step," she clarified, like everyone and their ma didn't already know she was still big into the step aerobics.

"Choreography is a second point of order," Erin said, "or third, maybe," because she could practically feel Michelle begin to bristle beside her, ready to unleash something no doubt profanity-ridden about not wanting to do naff choreo — ever since that annoying second cousin overseas had started sending her CDs she'd gotten mighty big on _cool_ music. Wouldn't even do the Whigfield anymore, well, not every time, anyway, and she was no longer convinced that she was married to Robbie Williams on a different plane. That was how bad it had gotten.

"Erin is right," James said. "First we decide on the music."

"No covers. That much we agree on." In what had to be considered a victory, James didn't actively protest. "And as for instruments…"

"I don't think my voice will do well in an a capella situation," Clare said. Orla turned her Orla gaze on her.

"Mine would."

"I don't think any of us would necessarily shine as a capella singers," Erin said, though she privately estimated her voice to be somewhere between 'good' and 'excellent', "but, well, needs must, and—"

"James plays the guitar." Michelle managed to make what should have been a plain statement of fact sound like an accusation. Every face in the room, even Orla's, turned to look at him.

"Oh, he does, does he? Is that right, James?" Clare said, a deeply wounded look settling over her features. "You've kept that on the down-low."

"I don't see why you need to sound so betrayed."

"Because you lied, James," said Orla. "Sparkling clean lies."

"Yeah, I've been hearing him twinkling away on over from the next room for weeks now, and not a peep out of him about his new 'hobby'."

"I didn't think you'd be interested!"

"Well, we are interested!" Clare's voice was steadily building up towards her usual crescendo. "We are interested, James! It’s not just about you anymore. You're in a _band_ now."

"That's right. And I'm not being in any fecking a capella band, just so's you know." Michelle glanced over at Erin; Erin just nodded her agreement. "We're counting on you now, guitar boy."

* * *

"Perhaps, and I think I'm entirely right in saying this, perhaps we should start to think about what kind of music we'll play."

Erin looked at Clare, sat ramrod straight in the middle of her bedroom, practically vibrating with righteous anxiety. Her eyes moved over to James, laid supine on the floor surrounded by half-eaten sweets and their wrappers, and Orla, a smear of chocolate cradling her face near enough from jaw to ear. The very idea of working — even if it _was_ her who'd called the very important meeting — made her want to boke.

Michelle was late and there had been quite a lot of snacking in her absence. They could hardly start brainstorming without her, after all, and she surely wouldn't begrudge them a snack. 

"Because right now, we're in a band without a style — without a sound—" Clare said, unruffled in the face of her friends’ lethargy— "or even so much as a song. I for one am not so sure that's a band I want to be in!"

"I'm not so sure it _is_ a band," James said, close-on groaned. His guitar laid next to him, looking almost as tired as he did.

"It is so a band," Erin scoffed, but found she had no compelling arguments in its favor, really. It didn't even have a name. "It is a band," she repeated for lack of anything else to say.

"We can't let grandda down." Orla’s voice drifted out despite the fact that her lips didn’t seem to be moving.

"That's right, Orla." Erin pointed at her with her full extended arm for a fraction of a second. She dropped it back down unceremoniously; it landed with a thud that felt almost painful. "We can't let grandda down."

She was relatively certain that grandda would not have cosigned the idea of the band quite so heartily had her father not voiced a soft objection — well, a soft concern, anyway — but why look a gift pack of sweeties in the mouth.

("A band," Da Gerry said.

"They play music, daddy," Erin replied with what she felt was exquisite and withering sarcasm. "Perhaps you didn't have them back in the Stone Age."

"I know what a band is, Erin." Da remained stubbornly inured to any sarcasm that his eldest daughter lobbed his way. "But, and forgive me for casting aspersions, but is there a single musician between the five of you?"

"James plays the guitar!"

James duly shifted his guitar case up a little. Da acknowledged it with a nod that nevertheless appeared to silently question the absence of another couple of instruments.

"'If I hadn't been a writer, I think I would have been a singer,'" Orla said out loud in her musing voice. "'And are lyrics not a form of poetry? Songs can break down barriers, clutch a hand in another hand. They make equals of us all.'"

"Would you stop quoting my diary!"

"I think Orla would thrive in a band," said Aunt Sarah, swiveling around to face them and peeking at them from beneath her newly-trimmed fringe, as round and tight as a sausage roll. "Really, I do. She's always been a great one for vocalising."

"So she has, love." Grandda always managed to state things with such certitude, like he'd brook no disagreement. Erin hoped to be able to one day cultivate a similarly unassailable way of phrasing herself. "Look," he now said to Da, "who are you try to stand in the way of my little girl's dreams?"

"I'm not trying to stand in anyone's way, Joe. I'm simply—"

"Why don't you go up to your room and rehearse?" Grandda said, interrupting da like he'd not even spoken in the first place. "I'll get you a treat to keep your spirits up. Show those nay-sayers who's boss. Prick," he added sotto-voce, standing up from the couch and walking towards the kitchen. Da Gerry just rolled his eyes.

From the amount of cakes and chocolate that was produced — and in no time at all! — Erin felt fairly sure she and the girls weren't the only ones intermittently dipping into the Christmas cupboard, but she wouldn't complain.)

"Settle down, girls," Michelle said as she burst into the loft. The fact that everyone, absent perhaps Clare, was sore and swollen with sugar and in no way could be accused of being anything less than settled did not seem to deter her. "I bring good news."

"We could use some good news," James said forlornly.

Michelle paused.

"What's with him? Never mind," she continued, "I don't care." She flashed the jewel case of a CD around the room; the low light filtering through the windows seemed to catch it straight on and get bounced directly into Erin's eyes.

"Please stop."

"Well, what's with you, then? What's with all of you? Wait til you see this! Rachel sent this to me, you know Rachel, my second—"

"Cousin from overseas, yes, yes, we know." Nobody could signal impatience quite like Clare.

"So that’s the good news?" Erin flopped back down onto the ground. “You got a parcel?”

“The good news is I found inspiration, Erin. And — from the look of you sadsacks — we need all the inspiration we can get. Gather round, gather round, ladies.”

Nobody did much gathering, but Michelle didn’t seem especially deterred.

“Bikini Kill,” she said. Actually, it was more like she proclaimed it. Proclaimed it with great pride, at that.

“What kind of name is that?” Erin said, just tired enough to be belligerent. “Bikini Kill. Bikini Kill.”

“It’s a better name than The Nether Regions, is what it is, but that doesn’t stop you wanting to hop onto David Donnelly’s dick and take him for a spin.”

Michelle put the CD down to the side and began fiddling with her pack of smokes. The fact of the matter was, the idea of getting with David Donnelly seemed less than appealing right that second, chiefly aided by the fact that the idea of being in a band seemed less than appealing right that second and also by the fact that she was so bloated with sugar she felt like a really irritable beached whale, but Erin wasn’t the type to admit she’d been wrong about something, and so she sat up once more and grabbed the CD.

“Let’s put it on, then,” she said.

She tried her hardest to look skeptical as the sound of the first song of the album seemed to physically punch its way out of the somehow timid-sounding speakers of her stereo, but Michelle was right, it was quite inspirational in its own shouty way, and so Erin sat up, nodding her head.

"It's got a message," Michelle said over the music. "Feminist and whatnot. Sorry to say, James." She looked over his way.

"What? I am a feminist," James said a little sullenly, like he couldn't believe he was being questioned. He, too, had sat up straight. "Like I could be anything else with you lot around."

"That's… quite sweet, actually. Right?" Clare looked from Michelle to Orla to Erin for confirmation. "Quite sweet."

"He's not always a dick," Michelle agreed. "Well, he probably always is a dick, but he has his less-dick moments. Micropenis, like."

"Gee, thanks. I don't—"

"Just listen to the music," Erin interrupted their little tiff, because she was getting quite into it and she didn't want her appreciation to go unnoted.

They played the album through three and a half times, until Ma Mary returned home from the shops and in no uncertain terms told them to turn the racket off.

“Rachel said the style is called riot grrrl,” Michelle said, and though Rachel was annoying and superior she’d sent Michelle — and, by extension, the group — a pretty great gift, so Erin let her name pass by without rolling her eyes. “Riot grrrl with three Rs. Like a growl. Grrr. You get it.” She attempted a growl. It was somewhat effective.

“Then,” said Clare, “shouldn’t we be called Derry Grrrls? Because we’re all Derry girls, and if riot grrrl is riot grrrl—” Clare’s growl sounded more authentic than Michelle’s— ”then we could be—”

“Yes,” said Orla and so it was settled. Rachel from America had done a good thing for once in her annoying and superior life! Happy days.

* * *

Next on the agenda, after they’d settled on a name: music and lyrics, which seemed like the second most important thing. Maybe the first most important thing, really, in all honesty. Well, at least they got started on it, although various members (Clare, James — not Orla so much) kept turning Michelle’s suggestions down on the basis of being nonsensical until she got fed up with their vetoing:

"It's punk, it doesn't have to make sense. It's all sex and blood and rage, am I right?" She began to sing somewhat tunelessly, which in fairness somehow seemed to be in the spirit of things: "I go to the beach. I see fellas all around. It's a nude beach! I see all their fellas, if you know what I mean. Hey, give us a riff!"

James managed to produce something that might charitably be called a punk riff on his very acoustic guitar.

"Come on, lads, let's put our heads into it, let's _jam_. Let's round robin this shit. Hey you, don't stop playing!"

James kept strumming chords that were quite divorced from anything anyone else was doing and Clare picked up: "I— I set fire to the beach," she sang uncertainly. "Arson, just, like, real arson. Absolute mayhem. And the fellas! I pick them up, I throw them on the ground!"

"I respect that," Orla sang back in a serene, actually quite melodic voice.

James choked the neck of his guitar and the music stopped for a moment. "I don't think I want to sing about naked men," he said. "My reputation in this place is precarious enough as it is. It's not that I care if they think I'm homosexual because I fully stand with homosexuals." He directed this comment to Clare and pointed at the rainbow pin they all consistently wore as a show of support. "It's just that, I don't know, maybe I'd quite like a girlfriend. One day."

“Then have your own verse, dicko,” Michelle said, shoving him in a way that was probably at least somewhat affectionate. “Sing about riding dinosaurs in a telephone booth for all I care. Not that I think that'll get you a girlfriend. Anyway, it's good to have some homosexual energy in punk bands. Genuinely."

"I don't know," Erin said, turning toward Michelle. She was biting the top of her pen; that seemed like the kind of thing to do in this situation. "Maybe. But I think it needs to be deeper than dinosaurs and naked men. It needs to have more — more soul. It could go a little something like…"

She hummed a slightly mournful tune to try it out, then, satisfied, put words to it: the first line of the first stanza of the glass doll poem she'd written for Ms. De Brún's class.

"That makes you sound clinically depressed," Michelle said once she was finished. "Completely emotionally destroyed, like. Don't get me wrong, crazy looks good on you. Plus, glass is good. Rhymes with class. Or ass."

"Do most punk songs have a rhyme scheme, then, Michelle?" James interjected.

"I don't know. I think you can pick. Let's not stop here, we're getting some good stuff, I'm into this glass doll/ass doll situation."

"What in the name of Jesus-Joseph-and-Mary is an ass doll?" Clare said and swiftly and rapidly followed up with, "Please, for all that is good in this world, don't answer that," when Michelle opened her mouth to respond.

Michelle tried anyway, of course. "It's a doll that— that— oh, never mind. Let's hear another riff!"

James gave a sad little riff. Erin finally felt like she had to say something.

"Should it not be electric?"

"Can we make it electric?" Orla asked, excitement blooming on her face.

"Maybe if we get some of those crocodile clips from the science lab?"

"I don't know, Erin." Clare sounded dubious. Perhaps she recalled Erin's admittedly not particularly good science marks. "We wouldn't want to electrocute him."

They all looked at James to try to gauge if the potential risk might weigh up for the potential reward.

"You're right," Erin said after a moment.

" _Thank_ you," said James.

Michelle seemed least concerned of all of them, despite the fact that every last Bikini Kill song she'd had them listen to had unquestionably not been so much about the acoustic guitars. "What's more punk rock than making do?" she said, folding her hands behind her head and leaning back against Erin's bed. "Shitty plinky guitars and drumming on an overturned bucket. It'll be grand."

Orla said, "Dibs on the bucket."

* * *

The vote for lead singer took place via secret ballot, with the obvious rule that you weren’t allowed to vote for yourself. Clare was given the task of counting the votes and reading them out and she took on her role with great dignity.

“With three votes, Erin. … and then Orla and James with one vote each.”

She placed the little pile of papers that constituted their vote slips back into Orla’s mesh cap on the ground. Michelle made a sound like she couldn’t believe it.

“Oi, who voted for dickface?” she asked, looking around.

“Beats me. I mean, who could say, really?” said Erin, who’d been worried that voting for Orla and her surprisingly melodic voice would mean the end of a potentially fruitful singing career. “ _Any_ way, I can’t believe you’d give such responsibility to little old me, it’s such an honour, and—”

“Give me those,” Michelle demanded, interrupting Erin’s semi-prepared ‘thank you’ speech.

“I hardly think it counts as a secret ballot if you’re going to perform a hand-writing analysis!” Before anyone could react much, Erin snatched up Orla’s cap. She scrunched the vote slips up and shoved them into her back pocket, then caught the eye of Clare, who was studying her sort of shiftily. Knowingly. She opened her mouth like she was going to say something, but when Erin looked at her beseechingly, she closed it again.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Michelle didn’t even sound too annoyed, just baffled. “You think I know what your hand-writing looks like?”

“You would if you read her diary,” Orla supplied. “I’ll lend you my copy.”

“Thanks, but if I wanted to hear a bunch of simpering over the immaculate beauty of Charlene Kavanagh, I’d ask Kavanagh herself.” Michelle shook her head and crossed her arms across her chest. “I just wanted to see you’re not having me on about Jimmy boy of all people — of all people! — getting a vote, I don’t know why you’re getting your knickers in a wad. Did you—”

“Well, anyway,” Clare piped up, “I feel like we’re not getting too much done here and the competition is quite soon really so maybe we should just crack on with it; Michelle, I think you said you had thoughts on stage clothes?”

Michelle’s attention seemed split for a second between Erin and Clare; she turned back and forth between them, minutely but noticeably, if you were looking. Finally, Clare’s bid won out.

“Aye,” she said and pulled a large bundle of eyeliner pencils out of her pocket. They spilled out onto the floor, nice new long ones coupled with tiny well-loved stubs, clattering merrily and rolling in beneath things. Orla swiped at the nearest one like a cat pouncing on a cockroach and unscrewed its cap, a smile spreading slowly over her face. “Thoughts on stage make-up, anyway. Avon recalls. Not usually toxic, but you might get a splinter if you don't watch out.”

Erin didn't particularly like the thought of eye splinters, but free make-up was free make-up.

* * *

“Erin, did you vote for me?” James asked later, while they were all crowded in front of the mirror in the Mallon upstairs bathroom, getting well into drawing thick black lines around their eyes. He smudged the outer corner a bit with the pad of his pinky finger, then leaned back to check what it looked like.

“You look ridiculous,” Michelle said fondly. “The absolute state of you.”

James ignored her and went back to smudging. “Well, did you?” he said.

“Of course not,” Erin said, alarmed at the prospect of being rumbled. “Why would you think that?”

“Because you were so insistent that Michelle not look at the votes, and—”

“Nobody voted for you, dicko,” Michelle said. “Don’t flatter yourself so much.”

“Somebody literally did, though,” James countered. “Somebody verifiably voted for me. Don’t you remember? Clare said three votes for Erin, one vote for Orla, one vote for James.”

“That doesn’t sound right.” Michelle’s voice was skeptical. She tried the words out: “One vote for James. One vote for James. Are you sure you don’t mean two votes for Orla?”

“That sounds right to me,” said Orla.

“But…” James looked more like he felt like he _should_ be upset than he actually _was_ upset. “Clare?”

“Yes, well,” she said, “that’s not so important, is it, I think the important thing is that eyeliner really suits you, James.”

“Really?”

“Yes, great look. Really strong look. Fantastic.”

James seemed more than happy to receive a rare compliment in lieu of the truth about the votes, and Erin shot Clare another look in the mirror, grateful for the successful distraction attempt.

“You look good, too, Clare,” she said because she really did: the smoky dark ring of liner made her blue eyes look bluer and brighter; her hair lighter; her skin clearer. Could eyeliner make your skin look clear? Perhaps as a sort of contrast? “You look hot.” She didn’t normally use that word too much, it was more of a Michelle-style word, but in this case it was true.

“Thank you,” Clare said, her made-up eyes lingering on Erin for a second before she looked away, her cheeks growing pink. “So do you, actually.”

“All right, all right, stop riding each other, you two. Orla, stop writing whatever it is you’re writing.” Orla caught Michelle’s gaze but did not stop writing on her forehead. “Let’s talk leather jackets. Who’s pro and who needs to go suck a dick?”

Despite the fact that nobody in the room actually owned a leather jacket, they were all quite happy to squabble about it for a while.

* * *

In the end, they went for a bit of a crustacean theme, primarily because Michelle, sick of everyone’s inability to make up their minds, started banging out old Ramones songs, replacing words at random. Some worked better than others — Bonbon Heart was no real hit and everyone (that was, aside from Michelle) roundly rejected Michelle is a Punk Rocker on the basis of ‘Michelle’ not scanning as well as the original ‘Sheena’ — but a relative constant was that the monosyllabic and punchy word ‘crab’ worked in almost every context. Thus: Judy is a Crab. Beat on the Crab. Crab Sematary.

My Fella’s Got Crabs (But That’s Not Why I Left Him) was quite the sweeping epic, enumerating the various reasons why the unnamed narrator’s boyfriend got thoroughly ditched. The reasons included an infuriating hair mousse habit; an inability to track animals by scent; an inexplicable soft spot for pop quizzes that counted toward your final grade; the tendency to call things ‘wee’ that were in no way small; no poetic sensibility or interest in the arts; the possession of crabs, of both the hermit and the genital variety; and, finally, the fact that the unnamed narrator had fallen in love with her best friend and decided to go off into the sunset with her instead.

The music was maybe not all that (it tended to change a bit each time they played the song in an ill-defined and hard to grasp way, like they were trying to nail jelly to the wall) but the lyrics were a masterpiece and wasn’t that the most important thing? After four attempts where the tempo ranged from ‘jazzy’ to ‘dirge-like,’ the group made a decision to try to model its sound on Rebel Girl, their favourite song off the Bikini Kill CD: Erin cleared her throat and tried to ready her delicate larynx for some proper shouty singing.

Though between James’s plinky guitar and Orla keeping the beat with her bucket the effect was a little more muted than the heady rush of Rebel Girl, it was still good. Really good. Erin thought so, anyway. Michelle had other thoughts.

“Actually, lads, this is not working for me,” she said after a rendition of the song that actually managed to mostly match the previous rendition. “We’re too nice, we sound too nice. Erin sings like she’s in Sunday school.” Erin narrowed her eyes at that: she did not. Michelle ignored her glare and continued, “Maybe there’s something to be said for that homosexual tension I was talking about. I mean, there’s a bit. In the lyrics. But I need more.”

“Michelle—” James sounded resigned more than anything.

“I didn’t mean you, ballbags. Clare! Since you’re the only one in this room who’s proper out of the closet, why don’t you pick yourself a lady.”

“Pick myself a lady,” Clare repeated. “Pick myself a lady. What’s that supposed to mean!”

Erin felt the heat pricking at her cheeks before she could even begin to understand why she was actually blushing.

"To mack on," Michelle clarified.

"You want Clare to have to mack—" What kind of word was 'mack?'— "stage kiss someone?" said Erin. "Isn't that kind of like prostituting her?" One of the few feelings she was able to identify was a vague kind of defensiveness on behalf of Clare, although Clare didn't look upset, exactly, she looked like she was… considering it?

"One of us, dingus. She's safe with us." Michelle's eye rolls were a thing to behold; she seemed to have like thirty different variants, each of which she employed to great effect. This one seemed to convey something like, 'You're out-dicking James, Quinn.' "Now," she continued, "I would volunteer my excellent macking services, but, Clare, up to you."

Orla looked Clare over, quietly interested. James looked at a complete loss for words.

"I choose…" said Clare, pausing for dramatic effect.

"You're going along with this?" Erin could barely believe it.

"Erin. I choose you, Erin." Clare sent her a complicated little smile.

A swift swoop of heat rushed in and settled in the pit of Erin's stomach. Her first kiss with a girl was to take place on stage in front of all the Foyleside? What if she totally embarrassed herself? What if she was… no good at kissing? She hadn’t gotten _that_ much practice in; she wasn’t Michelle. And it seemed important, somehow, that she not let Clare down by being crap. She glanced at her then glanced away.

“Me?” she croaked.

“You,” Clare said, and that seemed to be that.

* * *

One afternoon in school, after lunch, when Erin was already feeling very full of chips and therefore mildly annoyed, Mae Cheung barreled up to the group in the hallway. Specifically, as it turned out, she barreled up to Clare.

“Why don’t you join _us_ instead, Clare?” she said without so much as saying hello. Without so much as a smile, either to Clare or to the remainder of the group.

“Join you in what?” Clare said.

“We have a spot for you in our band, Groll.” She looked at Orla — of all people! — superciliously, though Orla remained unruffled. “It’s German.”

“We know it’s German,” said Erin, even though she didn’t, and linked arms with Clare tightly, “and, anyway, Clare’s with us.”

“Yeah, piss off,” Michelle agreed. “Eh, Clare?”

Clare nodded silently and even James crossed his arms.

“Right, so if you need a fifth member to shore up your numbers,” said Erin, her own smile just as supercilious, “you might look elsewhere.”

“We don’t need a fifth member, we have quite a waiting list, actually, of people wanting to join,” Mae said, though Erin was sure her words had hit home: Mae looked mighty defensive for someone who allegedly had applicants lining up. “I just thought that, as a member of the lesbian community, you might want to be in a band that’s less… provincial.”

“’Provincial?’” said Michelle, gearing up for a fight. “You calling us provincial, Donegal?”

“Is Donegal even a city?” James’s dumb geography trivia skills were coming in handy, for once. “I think it’s just a town, isn’t it?”

“What I mean is,” Mae said, ignoring both Michelle and James, “I think Groll would just be a better fit.” She sized the five of them up, clearly finding four-fifths of them wanting. “Three straight girls and an Englishman? You could do better, Clare. Much better.”

Erin didn’t know what possessed her — general bullheadedness and a residual dislike of Mae? The knowledge that she was going to kiss Clare anyway and so she might as well start early, in a figurative sense? Protectiveness of her best friend? — but she unlinked her arm from Clare’s and slammed it around her waist instead.

“ _Two_ straight girls and an Englishman, actually,” she proclaimed, throwing her shoulders back as much as she could manage with her arm still wound around Clare. She squared her jaw and stared Mae down — Mae’s response was just a straight up derisive laugh.

“You? You’re supposed to be a lesbian now? The girl who ditched Clare for that model-fucker pile of wank John Paul O’Reilly — only to get ditched herself! — says she’s a lesbian. That’s very funny.”

“That’s when I realised, though, wasn’t it?” Erin said. “Because I was so jealous—” well, the jealousy bit was admittedly one hundred percent real— “I realised that I had a thing for Clare.” It didn’t feel that untrue when she said it and it came out sounding downright earnest. Erin was pleased: clearly she was becoming a better liar. She’d beat Orla at poker yet. “And now,” she continued as skepticism distorted Mae’s features, “now we’re a couple.”

“Now you’re a couple,” Mae echoed.

“That’s right,” Michelle said, stepping up beside them. “Riding each other half to death, they are, it’s a wonder we get anything done. Their fingers are too tired to play instruments, like. Because that’s what lezzers do, you know. Fingering.”

She looked very proud of herself for her knowledge of what lesbians did in bed. Erin happened to know that she’d spent quite some time researching it back when Clare first came out — not first-hand, but with, like, girlie mags and things — and now they were all five of them very familiar with the vagaries of woman-on-woman sex, at least as interpreted by girlie mags.

“So much fingering,” Erin confirmed. “Masses. Sure, we do little else.”

“And they also do the mouth stuff.”

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” said Mae with a snort.

“You’re not gonna see it, you perv,” Michelle snapped back.

“Shocking,” Orla said with a slow shake of her head.

“That’s not what I—”

“Piss _off_ , Cheung,” Michelle said again. Erin was worried that Clare would rumble her, denying her lie and moving away from her arm. But she didn’t. If anything, she seemed to relax a little bit into Erin’s hold. The smile that spread across Erin’s face was quite genuine.

“Thank you very much for the offer, Mae,” Clare said politely. “But I think I will stick to Derry Grrrls.”

“Derry Grrrls,” Mae said. She didn’t need to say anything else to impart just how pathetic she thought the name was; that came across loud and clear. “Well, we’ll see how that works out for you when Groll wins. And your little relationship.” She laughed. “We’ll see how that works out, too.”

“What a dick,” said Michelle as Mae turned on her heel and left. “I thought she was expelled after the tomato ketchup fandango.”

“Tomato juice,” said James.

“You would have thought she’d be run out of town,” Orla said. “Clare grassed on her good.”

“Proudly. And I’d do so again. But don’t you remember? Sister Michael ‘did not particularly care about your dresses.’” Clare was great with the air quotes. “And she would ‘not go along with the silly scheme of a civil suit to recoup the money you stole from your mammies to buy said dresses.’” More air quotes. “And then we all got detention and Mae got away with it.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s when I made that great geography poster.” James got something wistful in his eye.

“Nobody gives a fuck about your stupid geography poster, James.” Michelle thrust her fist in the air. “But mark my words, Derry Grrrls are gonna stomp Mae Cheung’s stupid band into the ground. _Into the ground._ ”

“Aye,” Orla agreed. “We’ll bury them.”

“Decimate them,” was Clare’s contribution.

“Yeah!” said James, the insult to his geography poster swiftly forgiven.

“Ruin them,” said Erin. She looked down the hallway, though Mae had long since disappeared in the crowd, and clutched a hand to her heart. “We’re going to absolutely ruin them, girls.”

* * *

“The nerve of her,” fumed Erin, receiver clutched between her shoulder and neck, reaching forward to paint her toenails. “The absolute nerve.” The mixing beads in her bottle of Revlon Vixen, clenched in her other fist, clacked together merrily as her hand shook with indignation.

“In fairness to Mae,” came Clare’s voice over the phone, slightly tinny but clear, “you’re not an actual lesbian, Erin.”

“She doesn’t know that. I could be a lesbian. She doesn’t know that I’m not.”

“I think she does know that, actually.”

“She just wants to poach you, you know. For her stupid German band.” Erin managed to smudge her pinky toe with the side of her hand and it was all she could do to contain a scream of rage. “She doesn’t care about you. Not like I do.”

“I know,” Clare said, sounding faintly amused.

“And I’ll be the best girlfriend.”

“I’m— I’m sorry?”

“I’ll be an amazing girlfriend.” After a critical stare at her toes, and after deciding it’d have to do, Erin screwed the cap of the nail varnish bottle back on and grabbed the receiver in her hand instead, all the better to signal her strength of purpose. Not that anyone was watching; Orla, sat in her own bed, was busying herself with a bottle of colourful sand she’d bought during a visit to Ballintoy Harbour and apparently paying little attention to anything else.

“You’ll be an amazing girlfriend,” Clare repeated. “ _My_ amazing girlfriend?”

“That’s right.”

“I think you’ll forgive me for asking this, but why?”

“Why what?”

“Why would you want to pretend to be my amazing girlfriend?”

“Why? Isn’t it obvious why?”

“Yes,” said Orla from her bed; Erin wasn’t sure whether she should give her a thumbs up for agreeing or the finger for eavesdropping. She settled on just turning away.

“No,” said Clare. “No, I don’t think it’s obvious at all, actually.”

“Because— to show Mae up, that’s what. And maybe it will make everyone remember you’re a lesbian so that other girls will ask you out,” she added, though she’d only just thought of that. “And… Christ, don’t make me say it.”

“Say what?”

“Because I, you know, love you.” In an undertone, she added, “ _Gross._ ”

“Erin.” Again, Clare sounded more amused than touched.

“As a friend.”

“I know.”

“And you love me, too, so don’t try to pretend otherwise. And,” she went on before Clare could say anything, feeling awkward about having said the words ‘I love you’ for the first time since the halcyon days of Toto, “we’re going on a date tomorrow.”

“We’re going on a date.”

“Yes.” Why was Clare repeating everything Erin said? “To that new ice cream place, the American-style diner situation.”

“Are you asking me or just telling me?”

“Just— well, do you want me to ask?”

“Yes,” said Clare firmly. “I think an amazing girlfriend would ask.”

“Well, do you want to come with me to the American-style diner situation tomorrow, Clare?”

“Yes. Yes, I do. That would be nice.”

* * *

For Clare and Erin’s ice cream date, Erin dressed up in her best striped jumper and black corduroy skirt and made her way to Aoife’s Diner, where Clare was already sitting in a booth, similarly dressed up in a black corduroy skirt and a pink t-shirt that slightly clashed with the (in Erin’s opinion) dumb red vinyl.

“Hi Clare,” she said, feeling awkwardly formal, like she was going to a job interview, not that she’d ever had one. This was a bit like one, though, she supposed, or like an audition. An audition to be Clare’s girlfriend. Her fake girlfriend. Maybe that was what all dates felt like. She’d never properly been on a date, after all — the date with James after she was cruelly stood up didn’t count. “I like your shirt.” She sat down.

“I like your shirt, too,” Clare said. She too sounded almost polite, but then her rehearsed-looking smile broke into a proper Clare smile and Erin smiled back, unusually elated to see it. “And we’re wearing the same skirt. Jinx.”

“Jinx,” Erin said back. “Great minds and all, am I right?” They all had one, well, except for James; it was a good and universally flattering skirt. It looked better on Clare than on anyone else, though, Erin was quickly realising. She had great curves and the skirt showed them off really well.

“Aye,” said Clare. “So what are we having? Ice cream?”

“Anything you want,” said Erin. “My treat.” That was an amazing girlfriend thing to do, right? she thought to herself, beginning to look around for a waiter. It must be.

“Actually, I don’t think this place does table service,” said Clare and Erin stood up with a nod. Clare gave her a little smile Erin couldn’t quite read and continued, “You pick for me, Erin.”

That sounded daunting, but Erin was not the type to back away from a challenge, and so she just nodded again.

“But no peanuts,” Clare called after her. “Absolutely no peanuts.”

Erin scoffed — like she’d ever be insensitive enough to get Clare peanuts. She came back with two Aoife’s Luxury Jukebox Sundaes, one chocolate and one strawberry, and put the strawberry one in front of Clare. She’d gotten them each a milkshake, too, because sometimes you had to allow yourself to splurge a bit.

“Strawberry,” she said triumphantly, pointing with her straw at Clare’s ice cream. “Whipped cream. No nuts. Fruity hundreds-and-thousands. Two Maraschino cherries. Did I nail it or what?”

“Nailed it,” Clare confirmed and raised her pink milkshake to Erin in a pretend toast. Erin was not too good to clink milkshake glasses and did so once she’d sat back down.

“So,” she said, when the clinking was done and over with, “what do you actually do on dates? I mean,” she hastened to add, “what do you do on dates, because I’ve of course…” She trailed off, acutely aware that Clare knew very well that she wasn’t actually very experienced. She was seemingly kind enough not to mention it, though. Erin supposed — in fairness to herself — Clare couldn’t have been on very many dates, either.

“Not that you’ve been on very many dates, either,” she said, because apparently she couldn’t just keep a fool thought in her head without blurting it out. She gave herself a stamp on the foot. Well, she gave herself a stamp on the foot mentally.

“I’ve been on a few,” Clare said nonchalantly — nonchalantly! — licking daintily at her ice cream spoon. Erin stared at her.

“No, you haven’t,” she said, putting down her own spoon in shock.

“I have.”

“No, you haven’t,” Erin repeated. She felt unaccountably like she’d been sliced in two, or punched in the face, or pickpocketed — a sort of sickening realisation that the world was not what she’d thought it was or indeed what it should have been.

“I _have_ , Erin. Is that so hard to believe?” Clare sounded like she was beginning to get a little upset and Erin hasted to reassure her:

“Not because you’re not great, any girl would be so lucky, really, any girl would be incredibly lucky, but where did you find another wee lesbian? In Derry?”

“The youth club.”

“When were you at the youth club? You’re cruising at the youth club now?”

“My mammy was going to a concert.”

“At the youth club?”

“They couldn’t book a different venue for love nor money. Do you have a problem with me seeing other girls, Erin?”

“No,” said Erin, even if she wasn’t sure she meant it. No, of course she meant it, as long as it wasn’t Mae. “I’m just surprised, is all. I thought you would have told us.”

“It was just two dates. And they weren’t very good. And I think she wasn’t really a lesbian. She said it was ‘worth a go, but not for her in the end.’”

“That’s some shite.” Erin felt ridiculously annoyed on Clare’s behalf. “What a dick. Her loss, honestly.”

A strange look — a rather sad look — twisted Clare’s features for just a moment and it made Erin want to go out and absolutely wreck the unnamed girl at the youth club, whoever it was. She reached out across the table to pat Clare’s hand, but instead she took it and held it, squeezed it. Something about it felt right. Good, even. Nice. Slightly confusingly so, but still.

All of a sudden, the bell by the door rang, jolting Erin from her wandering thoughts. She pulled her hand back as the door swung open: a tall figure in a distressingly cool dress and long, shiny hair stalked in and swept her gaze across the establishment. Clearly finding what she was looking for, or who she was looking for, more like, Mae made her way over to Erin and Clare’s table.

“I heard you’d be here,” she said, once again without as much as a hello.

“Where would you possibly have heard that?” Erin asked.

“That brunette of yours — the mouth, not the headcase or the fella — was shouting about it in English class today. Have to say, I’m surprised you’re here.”

“Why are you surprised,” said Clare, “there is no reason to be surprised.”

“Right.”

Mae left with that single word and sat down at a table of her own, but Erin could feel her oppressive and judgmental eyes on them.

_Well, fuck her, then._

In order to show her what was what, Erin pushed aside Clare’s depleted milkshake and deposited her own in the middle of the table instead. She shoved Clare’s straw in there next to hers and said, “Drink.”

“What?”

“ _Drink._ ”

Clare looked at her like she’d suddenly lapsed into Swedish. Erin just pointed wordlessly at the second straw.

“Fine,” Clare said with a sigh and leaned forward. Erin, pleased with the acquiescence, did the same. It was a bit tricky, trying to wrap her lips around the straw without bashing her forehead into Clare’s, but they both just about managed it. Erin stared down at the sinking surface of the sludgy milkshake. Was this romantic? What were Americans _like_?

But then they reached the bottom of their glass and the straws made identical unpleasant slurping noises. They both started laughing at the same time, and all of a sudden it did feel romantic. Erin pulled back and her straw, untethered from its heavy drink, reeled back with her and hit her in the face, and even that felt kind of romantic, at least when Clare reached out with a napkin to dab the milkshake traces off her face.

Oh, and it was probably driving Mae crazy, though Erin had to admit she’d lost track of that for a moment.

“You’re right,” Clare said once Erin was back to reasonably clean. “For once I’ll say you’re right.”

“Course I am,” Erin said with conviction. “I mean, right about what?”

“You have the makings of a pretty amazing girlfriend.”

Erin grinned, more chuffed at the compliment than she could have anticipated.

“You think?”

“Yeah. This is the nicest date I’ve been on in… well, ever, really. Honestly.”

“Me too,” said Erin and found that she meant it.

“Yes, but you don’t go on dates.”

“I do so. I would, at least, if I didn’t have such high standards. And it doesn’t matter. It’s a great date. Stop trying to tell me I can’t think it’s the nicest date.”

“Fine,” said Clare with a forced note of exasperation that was betrayed by her smile. “I’ll stop trying to tell you that you can’t think it’s the nicest date.”

* * *

“Erin,” Ma Mary shouted up the stairs. “Phone call for you.”

Normally, Erin would feel a bit peeved that she got interrupted in the middle of practicing an interview in the mirror, but a phone call was a phone call, and so she told the mirror in a somber voice that they were breaking for some important news. She picked up the phone in her room and shouted down to Ma that she could put it down on her end.

“Hello?” she said into the receiver.

“Erin?” It was a man of some variety, but she didn’t recognise the voice.

“That’s she. I mean, that’s me. I’m Erin. Who’s this?”

“This is David.”

“David who?”

“David Donnelly.”

“Oh, David _Donnelly_.” Of course. Were there even other Davids? Important ones? “That’s…” She was going to say ‘unexpected’ but felt suddenly unsure if that was a normal thing to say. Instead she went with, “How are you?”

“Good. Grand. You know, lots of big things with the band. Lots of DJing gigs.”

“That’s fun. The DJing.”

David didn’t say anything and Erin didn’t say anything and finally she got fed up with the awkward silence and went, “You know, I’m in a band, too, now.”

“Really?” He sounded impressed; at least Erin liked to think he did. “I didn’t know you played.”

“Well, I don’t play, as such, but I sing. And the others play.” Not all of the others, but it sounded better than saying ‘James plays the acoustic guitar and Orla plays the bucket.’

“Right on. How long’s this been a thing?”

“Not too long. We’re doing the Battle of the Bands. At the Foyleside Shopping Centre.”

Erin dimly remembered that she’d actually originally strong-armed her crew into joining the competition specifically to be able to dazzle David Donnelly into boning her (as Michelle would no doubt have it) but right now that all felt kind of hazy and distant. Anyway, he didn’t appear especially dazzled.

“The Battle of the…? Okay. Right.”

“What?”

“Well, it’s just, it’s a bit… I don’t wanna say ‘selling out,’ but…”

He was clearly at least happy to imply it.

“A gig’s a gig, isn’t it?” she said, sounding a little more truculent than she would have liked. “You took that DJing job at Jenny Joyce’s Chernobyl wain party, even though you had to play _Grease_ songs all night.”

“Ouch. Ouch.” David laughed. “Guess you’re right. We’ve a standing gig at the youth club now, though.”

He paused as though to wait for admiration, but all Erin could think was that she never wanted to hear about the fecking youth club again.

“One Thursday night a month. So maybe you could hang with us sometime. Grab a beer. Jam a little.”

“Maybe, yeah.” The idea didn’t make Erin feel as enthused as she thought it might.

“On Saturday?”

“That’s not a Thursday,” Erin pointed out sort of uselessly.

“Yeah, but you and me, you know. We could jam. If you know what I mean.”

“I have a date on Saturday, actually,” Erin said. It wasn’t even some sort of playing-hard-to-get lie; she was taking Clare to the Lisnagelvin swimming pool. Maybe she should still keep her options open, though. After all, their fake dating lark had to come to an end at some point — she felt a little gloomy at the thought of it. “But maybe some other time.”

“Oh, fair enough. Well, hit me up if you ever want to hang. Or bring the band with you. I bet I could swing you a song or two before our set.”

“A song or two?” Erin repeated. “That doesn’t sound like much.” Obviously they only had one song, but David Donnelly didn’t know that.

“You could be sort of like our supporting act?”

Their supporting act? The Nether Regions’ _supporting_ act? The nerve of him. The very nerve!

“Derry Grrrls are no one’s supporting act, David Donnelly,” Erin well-nigh snarled. First the selling out accusation, then the one or two songs, then this? She would not countenance it.

“I didn’t mean—”

“Oh, I bet you didn’t mean. I just bet you didn’t mean! I said _good day_.”

She slammed the receiver down and heaved a sigh. So much for keeping her options open.

* * *

“Act like you’re not up to anything.”

“I’m not up to anything,” Erin felt she needed to point out. It was salient and it was true. “So that should be easy enough.”

She crossed her arms and looked at Michelle, who was skulking around the short aisles of Dennis’s corner shop acting very much like she was up to something. It was one of those times that came around intermittently, maybe once every three months or so, when Michelle decided to be a delinquent and try her hand at shoplifting. Unfortunately for everyone involved — Dennis, who’d once legitimately injured his vocal cords shouting having noticed Michelle’s bulging pockets; Michelle, who’d have to contend with yet another ban from the shop and yet another row with her mammy; even the sweets, clots of dust immediately seeming to envelope and subsume them once they’d fallen to the floor — Michelle wasn’t very good at being a delinquent.

“Well, be a look-out, then.”

Erin did some cursory looking-out, whatever that entailed, as Michelle tried to stuff a Mars bar in a jeans pocket blatantly too small to hold it.

“They don’t make girls’ trousers with big enough pockets, you know?” Michelle said. The wrapper crinkled conspicuously every time she tried to shove the chocolate bar deeper. “Now fellas got the real gear, you should see James’s stupid trousers, they could hold the fucking Titanic in one pocket and Big Ben in the other. It’s pure sexism.”

“It’s sexism?” Erin watched as Michelle gave up and put the Mars bar back on the shelf. From the scuffed wrapper to the obviously squished and dented chocolate beneath it, the bar looked very much worse for the wear.

“Yeah, they don’t think women can be thieves. And what’s more is they don’t want women to be thieves. But if it’s a fella, it’s okay.”

Erin paused, sort of wanting to disagree with Michelle for the sake of a light piece of friendly bickering, yet finding no very convincing argument against her.

“Maybe you’re right,” she said. She did at least manage to talk Michelle into buying the mangled Mars bar instead of taking it and running. Dennis’s mustache quivered with suspicion as they paid up, but it wasn’t like he could call the cops on them for taking pity on a very mistreated piece of merchandise.

“Ha, speaking of trousers,” Michelle said, tearing the wrapper off and giving Erin half the chocolate bar, “guess what Clodagh McCullen asked me in French the other day.”

“I don’t know.” Erin cleared her throat: “Combien sont ces pantalons?”

“No,” Michelle scoffed. “Of course not. What the hell does that mean?”

“How much are these trousers. I think.”

“Well, why would she ask me that, it’s not like I’m a fucking shop clerk in Paris, is it? No, she asked me who wears the trousers in your relationship, you or Clare.”

Erin was a little intrigued despite herself. She wasn’t exactly sure why, but something inside her made her want to talk or think or journal about her fake relationship with Clare nearly incessantly, twisting and turning it, worrying away at it. Sometimes it felt like the itch you get when a cut is healing and all you want to do is scratch at the new skin and it drives you mad and you can’t think about anything else; other times, it felt rare and valuable and interesting, like a secret jewel she could take out and examine from every angle, watching light get thrown back and forth through it before she hid it away again.

“So what did you say?” she asked, trying for nonchalance. Again, she couldn’t put her finger on why, but she felt reluctant to show just how much she did want to talk about the fake relationship, like maybe her enthusiasm said something weird about her. Was she being disrespectful to Clare, was she treating it all like a freak show? Erin didn’t think she was, but what if she was? She busied herself with her Mars bar.

Michelle, as was her wont, appeared to have noticed none of Erin’s internal conflict.

“I said to mind her own trousers.” She put her half of the chocolate bar into her mouth and held it there while her hands were occupied with lighting a cigarette. Once she’d gotten it all sorted, she alternated drags and bites. That couldn’t taste very good, surely? But clearly it did; at least Michelle seemed pleased with the arrangement.

“Ah, this is the life,” she sighed. “Anyway, yeah, who wears the trousers. Total creep.”

“Aye. That’s a weird metaphor, anyway, isn’t it?” Erin said. She thought for a moment and continued, “What does it even mean?”

“Who’s the bossy one,” Michelle said, always happy to state something confidently despite having no idea of its veracity. Erin could only suppose she’d follow it up with something crude and she didn’t disappoint: “In bed. Who fucks the other one. Into the mattress, like.”

“That’s rep _uls_ ive.”

Michelle sent Erin a look like she’d suddenly come over all hateful and said, “Don’t let Clare catch you saying that. What’s wrong with you? There’s nothing repulsive about lady sex. I think we all learned that much from the mags.”

“That’s not what I— of course that’s not what I meant! I meant the implication of the trousers. It’s…” She trailed off. “That’s the real trouser sexism. Or homophobia, maybe. Or both!”

Michelle thought it over for a moment, then concluded, “Aye, I guess you’re right. I repeat: total dick. You’re both bossy as shit, anyway, on a good day. You’d both fuck each other into the mattress.”

The image zapped into Erin’s mind, because how could it not? A verbal disagreement of some stripe that turned incomprehensibly into a messy, still kind of fighty, half-angry kiss that turned into bodies pressed into mattresses and heads pressed into pillows, Clare capturing both of Erin’s wrists in her fist and holding her down. The thought was incongruous with anything she’d ever thought before, even about lads, and she had to tamper down a gasp as she was sent reeling by something that felt like what a fist to the stomach must feel like, a sort of mad rush ricocheting through her core and stealing her breath away. All the blood in her veins seemed to pool in her cheeks; she was sure they’d be hot to the touch if she put her fingers to her face. What was _wrong_ with her?

Michelle looked at her strangely for a second; then, in a flash, her expression morphed from weirded out and kind of concerned to smug and knowing. She raised her eyebrows at Erin and smirked. Erin hated the look, but she felt too raw with the sudden punch of emotion to tell her to get lost.

“What are you looking at me like that for?” she managed to hiss after a moment of trying to regain her senses.

“I never would have thought it. Fuck me, but I never would have thought it. Fuck-a-doodle-do. Fuck. A. Doodle. Do.”

“Stop saying that. Never would have thought _what_?”

But when Michelle opened her mouth to respond, Erin found that she was desperate not to have to hear it. She said, “Never mind, you only say stupid things. I need to go.”

“You need to go? I thought we were hanging out. We haven’t hung out since—” Michelle’s smirk grew wider and smugger, if that were even possible— “since you fell in love with Clare.”

Well, Erin definitely wasn’t going to stay now. “Just remembered I promised to help da with the big shop.”

“On a Thursday. At six in the evening.”

“Yes,” Erin said, then shoved the remainder of the Mars bar into her mouth and left. It tasted of nothing and seemed to grow bigger in her mouth like she was chomping down on a dish-washing sponge.

“Bad craic, Erin. Bad craic! Craic-killer!” Michelle shouted after her. Erin chose to pay that no heed.

* * *

Jaws physically dropping seemed to Erin to be a bit of a cliché, the kind a less enterprising writer might use, the kind Ms. De Brún would have struck out with a fat blue pen if she’d stuck around to read anyone’s writing. And yet Erin’s jaw physically dropped when she first laid eyes on Clare at the Lisnagelvin Leisure Centre swimming pool, clad in a new bikini — a real bikini, not a regular old swimming costume. Not like Erin’s — she suddenly felt like a child in comparison in her old manky one-piece. It was all she could do not to stare at Clare’s boobs, which, fair play to her, looked incredible.

“You look…” she said. Clare immediately got self-conscious.

“Dumb. I look dumb, don’t I?” she rattled off. “It’s a new bikini, I shouldn’t have worn it.”

“No, you look totally smoking,” Erin said, shaking her head in something like disbelief. She allowed herself just one look at Clare; she didn’t think that was too weird. The bikini was mint green and not exactly _skimpy_ skimpy, but Clare’s body was so good that it managed to just pure look really hot. Classy and all, but really hot. And her long blond hair hung loose and heavy around her shoulders, shimmering almost as much as the sparkling turquoise pool waters behind her. She looked like a mermaid. A sexy mermaid.

Had she just thought to herself that Clare was sexy? Yeah, it seemed like she had. Well, it was true, objectively.

“You look lovely, too,” Clare said.

“Not in this thing.”

“Yes, in that thing. Or without it.” Erin’s eyes widened — had Clare just said what she thought she…? — and Clare immediately began to excuse herself. “Not like that, _not like that_ ,” she said, “absolutely not like that, I just mean, all I mean is that you have a very pretty face and you look good in anything you wear.”

Her cheeks were flushed red and getting redder, and she turned around and bolted away from Erin, tearing off and jumping into the pool with a splash. Erin just stood there for roughly another second where she tried to square her surprise with Clare’s actual intentions, but then she followed and catapulted herself into the water as well. She swam after Clare, barking, “Hey!”

Clare did not stop swimming.

“Why are you running away from me?” Erin asked, loudly enough that an old lady in a floral swimming cap gave her a foul glare. Well, she had to be loud if Clare wasn’t going to slow down.

Though then she did. She turned back around to Erin and said, slightly high-pitched, “Because I’m embarrassed, Erin, that’s why.”

“Give it a rest, Clare,” Erin said with a roll of her eyes. She didn’t want Clare to be embarrassed, but she didn’t know how to fix it other than to just pretend nothing had happened, which of course it hadn’t. “Let’s go to the wave machine part.”

“It’s still closed,” the lady in the floral swimming cap informed them, treading water nearby them. “More’s the pity.”

“What’s the point if there’s no wave machine?” Clare’s voice was sharp with sudden irritation. “What’s the point of anything?”

“Truer words, love.” The woman gave Clare a somber look and Erin a considerably meaner one before paddling off.

“Okay, fine. Grand. That’s just great. Let’s go to the jacuzzi instead,” Erin said petulantly. “I’m freezing. It’s cold, isn’t it?”

“It is a bit, yeah.”

“Well then. Come on.”

The jacuzzi was boiling, almost too hot, but Erin was quite glad to have her mind occupied by the intricacies of dipping her toe, then pulling it back out, then plunging her full calf in and swearing under her breath as she forced herself to keep it there until she acclimatised to the heat. What was her mind even playing at lately? It kept offering up the most absurd thoughts and images, especially after what Michelle had said. Maybe she was going mad.

Clare hopped into the hot tub with little but a barely audible squeak and Erin decided that she couldn’t be less brave than that. With some more pronounced, less under-her-breath curses, she leapt in after her and sat down.

“Jacuzzis are pretty class,” she admitted once she’d started feeling a little bit less like a lobster in a pot. Clare gave something like a vague murmur of assent, her usually tense body untensing for once, like her whole soul was uncoiling. Since her head was tilted back onto the side of the pool and since her eyes were closed, Erin allowed herself to look at her for another moment. There was something mildly heart-breaking about getting to see her relax for once. They were always giving it out to Clare for the stick up her hole, but seeing her like this made Erin want to see it more often. She pledged to stop making fun of Clare for her insane neuroticism and to try to ease it instead. That wasn’t too much to ask of a friend.

Or of a fake girlfriend. Or of a real girlfriend. She should try to help Clare get a real girlfriend, probably. Something about the thought struck a cord of reluctance in her, but she batted it away. When Clare opened her eyes and found Erin practically staring at her, Erin immediately dropped her gaze, berating herself for being so obvious. Another blush rose to her cheeks — when had she started blushing so much? She’d blame it on the rising heat of the water if pressed, either by Clare or, more likely, by herself. Heat could make anyone blush, she told herself, it was called homeostasis or something like that. She probably looked weirder, in fairness, for staring through the water like she was hypnotised by her own magnified feet, so she looked back up at Clare, who was smiling a little. She met Erin’s gaze with her own.

Something about the way her face looked as she looked at Erin made Erin’s feet do some kind of absurd bid for freedom beneath her and she kind of slid off the seat into the slightly deeper middle of the tub with a louder splash than you’d think you could possibly manage to engender in a pretty shallow jacuzzi. She climbed back onto the seat, sweeping chlorinated and probably highly contaminated water off her chin, but she misjudged the distance somehow and ended up very close to Clare, not quite in her lap but not all that far from it.

And she found she didn’t want to course correct, so she didn’t. It didn’t have to mean anything. Turning and looking at Clare with an awkward laugh that Clare was quick to echo didn’t have to mean anything. She found herself leaning in closer, just a fraction, in a gesture that also didn’t mean anything. Something in the air, almost an electricity, a shift that was simultaneously imperceptible and very, very perceptible made her realise, sudden like a bolt from the sky, that if she’d been here on a date with almost anyone else other than Clare, she would have kissed her. Or him.

She couldn’t kiss Clare for so many reasons; for one, Clare wouldn’t _want_ to kiss her, not in a non-stage setting, anyway. And yet, despite that, Erin found in herself that she really, really wanted to kiss Clare, an urge stronger than more or less anything else she’d ever felt. Was this what Michelle felt like all the time? Clare’s eyes had closed again and Erin closed her own, like that would block everything out. Clare must be leaning closer, too, she realised, because suddenly she could feel her soft breath on her lips. She had to resist the urge, it was abject and total madness, but she couldn’t stop herself from moving another fraction closer. And another. She felt instinctively that Clare’s lips were very near to touching hers now — again, abject and total madness — and she thought she might just have to give into this and reckon with it later, when—

“Oy, you! Girls in the hot tub!”

A cross male voice sounded from over their heads; Clare and Erin leapt apart like two salmons. Erin looked up, feeling sodden with guilt more than gross jacuzzi water, and saw a lifeguard looming over them in way-too-snug red swimming trunks, holding his whistle to his lips. It was a small point of comfort, Erin supposed, that he’d not seen fit to blow in it yet, or she would probably have had a heart attack.

“What are you playing at?”

“Nothing, sir, nothing,” said Clare, her face as bright as Erin’s felt. “We were just—”

“You can’t be in here without swimming caps.” The lifeguard pointed at one of many rules posters plastering the walls: they were indeed, in addition to forbidding diving in the shallow areas and food in the water, big on the importance of swimming caps.

“Right,” Erin said. Thinking about it, she supposed she’d seen no patrons with visible hair aside from Clare and herself.

“Do you have swimming caps in your lockers?” asked the guard in a by far too self-righteous voice, in Erin’s opinion.

“No,” she said. Who brought swimming caps to a swimming pool date? Maybe actual athletes, at a push, but not normal people. He couldn’t kick them out for that, though, surely.

Apparently he could.

* * *

Later on, in an attempt to rinse the chlorine off, Erin poured a capful of bubble bath beneath the running stream of the tap and watched foam balloon up like a mushroom cloud on the surface of the bath water. Thoughts were milling through her head — no, that seemed too sedate a term for what they were doing. Racing, more like. The idea of Clare kissing her — her kissing Clare — made a shiver run through her, the edge of a sharp knife teasing her nerve endings. Cleaving them, maybe; Erin wasn't so sure about the physiology of nerve endings. Sending some kind of feeling blooming through her spine, settling in her belly, its heat cascading out into her arms and legs and face — like the bubbles of bubble bath expanding beneath a rushing faucet, she thought to herself, pleased with the simile.

She thought about Clare's sweet face beneath the severe slash of her fringe. The way Erin wanted to protect her from jibes and levy jibes her way in almost equal measure. She'd go to bat for any of her girls, of course. It wasn't really different with Clare. But it felt different.

She thought about Mae trying to poach Clare for her own stupid band and wanting to murder her, like, just pure murder her. Borrow Orla's lighter and set fire to her, maim her a bit before landing the killing blow. Really, on reflection the way Erin felt about Mae was not healthy, and, although it took her a little bit of thinking to realise exactly why she hated her with such an irrational, incandescent fury, it was all down to Clare. Specifically, the way Mae had treated Clare. Remembering the way she'd felt watching Mae ask Clare to the dumb fifties prom and Clare accepting and them gabbing over dresses and Clare taking Mae's advice over Erin's superior advice and so on and so forth was one thing, of course, and perhaps not a particularly rational thing, but it wasn’t the worst part, not even close. She recalled the stab of pain in her gut and chest as she realised just how lonely Clare must be was another, the happiness just to be asked as she assented to go to the prom with Mae despite the fact that everyone recognised she was just using Clare for clout.

(Although, in fairness, Clare was not innocent of the reverse of that and who didn't want clout anyway? You couldn't blame Clare for that. You could blame Mae, though, because somehow what she'd done was equal but more terrible.)

But even that wasn’t the worst part: the worst part was that Erin had driven on that loneliness, and indeed driven Clare into the duplicitous arms of Mae, by reneging on her promise to go with Clare. Honestly, she kind of hated herself for it. She’d said she’d take Clare to the prom and then she’d ditched her for that wanker John Paul. What had she been thinking? When she could have gone with Clare and had fun?

She sighed and climbed into the bath, submerging herself beneath the white drifts of foam. Her diary and a pen were sitting on the side of the tub and she picked them up. From talk show appearances to journaling, she thought all her best thoughts in the bath. Thinking for a moment about how the lines went, then peeking at the cheat note she’d prepared and sneaked into the back of the notebook, she wrote, “As the great T.S. Eliot once wrote in his seminal work Four Quarters, I am ‘Lying awake, calculating the future / Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel / And piece together the past and the future / Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception…’ Although Michelle said that he deserves nothing but pure and bloody death when she found out he inspired the musical Cats, I feel drawn to his words.”

That was quite good, she thought. The T.S. Eliot bit, not the _Cats_ bit. It felt like a quote that was suited to the situation, though she found she didn’t know how to continue. She was trying to piece together the past and the future, she supposed, and the past was all deception, in that her whole life had come to centre on her fake relationship with Clare. But what did that mean for the future? They’d defined no set end point to the relationship, but Erin imagined that it would probably fizzle out once other lesbians and bisexual girls started flocking to Clare — and, make no mistake, that wouldn’t take long. How could it, when the girl in question was Clare? And what would happen to Erin?

She’d be alone again. But she didn’t want to write about that, even though the spectre of impending heartbreak (did it count as heartbreak when the relationship was fake and you of course weren’t in love?) would normally be catnip to any young writer. Somehow, she wasn’t looking at it like that. Actually, she realised that she didn’t want to write anything at all. She put the diary to the side with a resolute sigh and dipped her head beneath the water.

* * *

It was the dawn of the competition and Derry Grrrls’ various family members dropped them off at the Foyleside Shopping Centre, some with threats that they might come watch the band’s debut performance, some with more lethargic well-wishes. The mall looked like most malls do, although it had not yet lost its sheen of newness. Dotted around here and there were arches stretching up toward the sparkly glass ceiling; several store fronts had excited shoppers practically spilling out of them, still other fronts gaped empty, festooned with signs promising "Coming Soon!"; shiny white lattice walls cradled the food court. Fake plants abounded; at least Erin thought they must be fake — their plump, lush, very green foliage seemed somehow studied, maybe even calculated. The really long escalator, the one where Maggie Walsh in the year above had lost her best finger in that tragic accident, had been judged safe for the public again. Self-tanned women flogging sharp pointy fake fingernails were sat in front of or behind little podiums, trying their best to reel passersby in with beguiling glances. Erin for one was not hooked.

Still, even though the Foyleside Shopping Centre was maybe kind of shit and mostly full of stores you could find in the high street, it was hard to deny there was something kind of magical about going to the mall.

"Can we go to Boots?" Orla interrupted Erin’s reverie, which she’d already begun to plan out as a spread in her diary: On the Captivating Yet Disturbing Nature of Capitalism.

"Of course not,” Erin half-snarled, irritated at being interrupted when she was only trying to distract herself from how her stomach seemed tied up in knots from nervousness. “What do you need from Boots?"

"I'm really buzzing off of those wee knives they've got." Orla inclined her head toward the impressively coiffed lady stood in front of Polished Cute-icles, a wall of ice cream-coloured nail varnish bottles towering up behind her. As a group, with almost perfect synchronism, they twisted toward the lady in question and looked; she hid her somewhat discomfited face behind a look book.

"The wee… what, the nail files?"

"Aye," said Orla solemnly, "but mammy says those girls try to screw you off with shoddy goods."

"She does not." Aunt Sarah was a proponent of cold-calling podium women if Erin had ever met one. Then again, she did know a thing or two about make-up. "Does she?"

“Never mind the acrylics,” Michelle said, pointing at the intimidatingly huge stage that had been erected in the middle of the mall. “Come on, come on, come on! Shift your holes!”

Clare and James were both looking quite pale with anxiety, but Erin felt a heady spike of adrenaline course through her and grabbed Orla’s hand.

“Let’s go!” she practically sang. She took off in a skip, or maybe more like a gallop, but stopped right in her tracks when Sister Michael appeared in front of her as if from nowhere. Everyone else stopped, too, even Michelle.

“Are you a judge, Sister Michael?” Clare asked, clearly petrified. Erin couldn’t exactly blame her.

“A judge?” Sister Michael looked mystified. James pointed with a slightly shaky finger toward the stage, which was festooned with big bright banners shouting ‘Foyleside Shopping Centre Presents!: Battle of the Bands 1995.’ She turned and looked over where he was pointing, then gave something between a chuckle and a sigh.

“Christ, no, you couldn’t pay me enough,” she said. “A judge.”

With a shake of her head and not much else in the way of a farewell, she took aim on a bookstore and left. Erin and company, meanwhile, took a sharp right and ended up backstage, where they fought for mirror space while drawing black circles around their eyes and rubbing bright orange tinted moisturiser all over their faces.

“A bit of Pernod to get this show on the road?” Michelle asked, patting her handbag. It clinked suspiciously.

“We’re not going to get _drunk_ before our first show.” Clare sounded appalled.

“Ah, lighten up, Clare. And, for the love of fuck, would you smear that eyeliner a little? More punk. More bite. You look like you’re going to church.”

“I would not wear black eyeliner to church!” Clare said. “And just because you’re punk doesn’t mean you have to look like a mess!”

“She looks really great, actually,” Erin said, though when she saw the gleeful, shark-like smile spreading over Michelle’s face, she wished she hadn’t.

“Of course _you'd_ say that, Quinn,” Michelle said. Luckily, nobody else was listening and, even more luckily and downright miraculously, Michelle didn’t press it further. She just took a swig from her little bottle of liquor and offered it around, shrugging and swigging again when she found there were no takers.

* * *

Derry Grrrls had been randomly chosen to go last, which was in equal parts terrifying and cool. It let them view all the other performances from backstage, although most of them (Erin privately thought and then loudly proclaimed) were not very good. For one, Big Mandy was there, because, as Michelle said, they’d “apparently let all the dregs in.” Though she looked sort of scared when she said it. Big Mandy’s performance was really less of a _song_ as such and more of a spoken word thing. And, actually, the spoken word thing was mostly a silent spoken word thing; the words she did say, she mumbled. But she filled out the pauses with lots of threatening glances at the audience and a general quite palpable sense of intimidation, so that was something. Not an especially good something, mind, but something.

Jenny Joyce and her band, Jenny and the Joyces, could afford good instruments, and did. They’d even managed to procure a small tabletop-sized disco ball lamp which spun merrily and projected some anemic colourful light beams that were immediately swamped by the harsh glare of the mall. Probably her doctor father had pulled some strings to get the disco ball, but, as evidenced by the _Saturday Night Fever_ "mega-mix" she'd brought to the stage and proceeded to slaughter, neither she nor her doctor father could buy taste. Nor could she buy dignity: she'd had Aisling and three other random girls dress up as John Travolta and she made them do lame pointy dance moves. That just about said it all.

Charlene Kavanagh was the rare exception, but wasn’t she always? Her band sang a capella and actually managed to pull it off.

The Nether Regions were there, too, for all David Donnelly had talked about selling out and how he was gonna do none of it. For all of his youth-club-gig, you-could-be-my-supporting-act bluster. Maybe it, too, was the impact of the harsh glare of the mall, but he suddenly didn’t look very cool to Erin. His hair was greasy and there was a huge stain on his flannel. _Just because you’re punk doesn’t mean you have to look like a mess._ She looked over at Clare, who did not look like a mess; quite the opposite, she seemed to glow. Even the giant mall lights couldn’t compete with the light she threw out — even Michelle and Orla and James seemed muted in comparison, slightly fuzzy and indistinct — and Erin’s eyebrows crinkled.

Then she panicked. All of a sudden, she couldn’t keep her feelings at bay anymore; they kept crashing into her so hard and fast she worried she might fall over. Though she wasn’t a fan of the kind of Harlequin romance novels Aunt Sarah collected (although, all right, she wasn’t too good to have dipped in once or twice when they’d been on holiday and there’d been nothing else to read) Erin had read enough books in her life to realise what this was. How hadn’t she seen it before, when she was so incisive and literate? No, she had seen it before, but she could no longer keep a lid on it. She could no longer repress it. It was all there.

The burgeoning realisation how pretty Clare was, for one. Like, of course she was _pretty_ , Orla and Michelle were pretty, too, and even James had his rare moments when he managed to turn his face just so. They weren’t the kind of friend group to run around throwing compliments at each other generally speaking, but they were all pretty, smart, funny, that kind of thing. Recently, though, Clare had either gotten markedly prettier, or Erin’s eyes had begin to tune into her in a different way, because all of a sudden her heart had begun to ache when she looked at her, and she seemed to be sort of outlined in a way that meant Erin was always looking at her; in any given room or situation, no matter how busy, her gaze always found Clare. And her heart didn’t usually ache like that — somewhere between what she supposed she’d have to characterise as elation and nausea — when she looked at other people, girls or boys. She’d thought it was, she didn’t know what she’d thought it was, she’d tried not to think about the ache too much, but here she was now.

And there was more. The way Clare had always managed to find her way into Erin’s mind lately; the constant, ever-present thinking about Clare and what Clare thought and if Clare thought she was funny or just stupid; the constant analysis of every interaction they’d had since… since… well, since they’d decided to fake date. Since Erin had decided that they’d fake date.

She was such an idiot.

Mae and her band came on. The announcer didn’t pronounce the German name right, or maybe Mae hadn’t pronounced it right in the first place — either way, it gave Erin a small stab of vicious pleasure to see the irritated look on Mae’s face. Their song wasn’t too bad, Erin begrudgingly admitted, but it was no crab anthem. Suddenly, they were off the stage and the announcer said, “Introducing… the Derry Grrrls!” in a hyping-up kind of voice. Erin tried to shove all thoughts of Clare to the side as she ran after Orla onto the stage and grabbed the microphone. Orla threw her bucket down and James gripped the neck of his guitar and then they were off to the races.

It was terrifying. And it was exhilarating. And somewhere in the middle of singing the verse, Erin realised that she was supposed to kiss Clare in front of everyone; her heart just about stopped. She faltered just before the first chorus, but managed to pick herself back up. She was a professional, wasn’t she?

“My fella’s got crabs, but that’s not why I left him,” they sang as a group. “His stuff’s full of crabs, but that’s not why I left him.”

“He wears lots of hair mousse,” James yelped.

“He broke my lava lamp,” Orla intoned darkly.

“And anyway—” They held the final, rising syllable— “I fell in love with my best friend!”

Erin thought it was going well, though admittedly the judges at the judging table looked a little nonplussed as they scribbled on their scoring cards. Two out of three of them were Father Peter and his untrue Hair and Flair ex-lover, so that didn’t bode so well for Derry Grrrls. Never mind. The show, she knew, must go on, and so she sang her heart out while Orla drummed and James strummed.

As she reached the second chorus, she kept sneaking glances at Clare, the best friend in question, as it had strangely turned out. She largely just looked scared, but something about her face, maybe her jaw, was set in steely determination — Erin’s just-about-stopped heart leaped right into her throat.

She tossed her microphone to Orla and Orla, all credit to her, didn’t miss a beat. She caught it like she’d been choreographed to catch it, then kicked her overturned bucket Michelle’s way. The clearly surprised Michelle swore into her own mic, but nevertheless began tapping on the bucket erratically. Erin took one long step over to Clare. In the split second before she planted her lips on Clare’s lips, Erin watched the expression on Clare’s face changing from fright to something else, something Erin couldn’t quite place.

The stage kiss had been intended to be just that from the start, obviously: just a peck, honestly, something for the audience to gawk at. Something to prove the band’s punk credentials; something to show that they _dared_. Dared to be different! But there was not a single thought about that on Erin’s mind as she crushed her mouth against Clare’s. She took a moment to establish this new normal, where she, Erin Josephine Quinn, was here, on a stage, during a punk song that she’d helped write, kissing Clare Elizabeth Devlin — but then all those thoughts disappeared, too, and all that was left was Clare’s lips on her lips, her hands, slowly at first, travelling up Erin’s back to twist into her hair. Erin’s hands on Clare’s waist, pulling her closer, closer, closer still; she couldn’t get her close enough.

The band had stopped playing. No, maybe they hadn’t. Maybe Erin just couldn’t hear them. Clare’s soft tongue slipped into her mouth and she literally, genuinely thought she might faint.

“Clare,” she breathed, almost moaned, into Clare’s mouth, but it was drowned out by the sound of applause. Applause?

Erin reluctantly let go of Clare’s waist and took a step back, just as Clare let go of her hair and took a step back. At this point, the band had definitely stopped playing; indeed, Orla, stood next to Erin, was taking a bow so deep her ponytail swept the ground. The clapping was a bit tentative. Confused, perhaps. The judges, too, looked confused, if not totally put off. Okay, maybe a bit put off. It wasn’t exactly the most enthusiastic crowd Erin had ever heard; still, she beamed out toward the scattered groups of people like they were giving her a standing ovation.

* * *

Clare seemed to feel roughly as discombobulated as Erin felt when Erin took a good look at her, once Erin had gotten her alone backstage during the judges’ deliberation period. She’d told the rest of them in no uncertain terms that they had to leave; Michelle, for once in her life, had apparently decided to be useful and not talk back, because she’d shepherded Orla and James off with the vague promises of a green room which Erin knew would never materialise.

“Clare,” Erin said, fighting the impulse to look away in embarrassment. “I have something I need to say.”

“That it meant nothing,” Clare said, something like sadness or defensiveness beginning to settle over her face. “Or that we’re just friends. Right? That’s what you were going to say? Don’t worry, I won’t—”

“What?” Erin frowned. “No. The opposite of that.”

“The opposite of that?” Clare repeated. The tension in her mouth seemed to give way somewhat, but she didn’t say anything else, she just watched Erin almost warily.

“I love you,” Erin said, and it felt somehow easier than when she’d said it on the phone all those weeks back, even though it had been true then, too. “And not as a friend, Clare. I mean, not just as a friend. I love you as a friend, too, obviously.” Christ, would she ever be able to stop babbling — she forced her mouth shut.

“Erin,” Clare said. “You’re not a real lesbian.”

Maybe she wasn’t really, Erin thought she was probably still into guys, too, but she still said, “I’m not _not_ a real lesbian.”

“Oh, come off it. You’re _not_ not _not_ a real lesbian.” Then she paused and continued in a very small and seemingly quite hopeful voice, “Are you?”

“No, I am. I mean, yes, I am. Or maybe not a proper lesbian, but I am…” It still felt kind of strange to say it, to voice it, to voice this new thing that she’d done her very best to tamper down. She pressed on: “I am in love with you.”

Clare laughed, but when Erin just sent her a slightly uncertain look in response — why was she laughing? Did she think Erin’s infatuation was that ridiculous? — her words swiftly began to flow.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m really sorry, Erin. I just never thought — honestly, I never would have thought this would happen. I wouldn’t even have hoped. I wouldn’t even have begun to hope. Not ever.”

Erin took a slow step closer, her eyes still on Clare’s eyes, just in case she wanted to back out. But Clare didn’t seem to want to back out. She tilted her chin up and took Erin’s hand, threading her fingers between hers, pressing her warm palm against Erin’s.

“I love you, too,” she whispered. “But you knew that.”

“I didn’t, actually,” Erin whispered back; it seemed to be an occasion for whispering. She leaned in to touch her mouth to Clare’s again, but this time Clare got there first. The kiss was gentler, sweeter, more considered than their stage kiss. Actually, it was a good thing the stage kiss had ended when it did, because Erin would, at this present point in time, not exactly claim she was confident in her ability to stop herself from tearing Clare’s clothes off, or at least shove her top up, and that really didn’t need to happen in front of an audience. It didn’t need to happen here, either, where there was the potential danger of Father Peter running in, but it wasn’t that kind of kiss. It was just Clare’s forehead against Erin’s forehead, Clare’s hand clasped in hers, Erin’s other hand cupping Clare’s face.

Though Erin hated to admit it, since it was another cliché that Ms. De Brún never would have approved, she didn’t know whether they kissed for a minute or ten minutes or two hours. She only knew that she never wanted it to end.

* * *

"I can't believe we didn't win," Orla said despondently as the group walked away from the posted lists of placements. Erin’s lips felt swollen and Clare’s hair was visibly ruffled. They both grinned like fools.

"I think saying we didn't win is a little short-sighted,” Clare said. “A little negative. Didn't we win in a lot of quite important ways? Ways that are more important, you might say, than the big prize."

"We were disqualified, Clare," James pointed out.

"Because the judges have sticks up their holes and that's final,” was Michelle’s verdict. “They wouldn't have disqualified us if you'd been macking on James instead, Erin."

The faintly repulsed look on James's face mirrored Erin's own thoughts on the matter.

"I genuinely think they would have, Michelle,” he said. “If Erin had interrupted her singing — in the middle of the chorus — to go snog just about anyone, in the way she snogged Clare, I think they would still have disqualified us."

"And Charlene Kavanagh was excellent, in fairness," Erin felt she might as well admit. "If anyone else had to win…"

"Reel your dick back in, Quinn."

Erin levied a lazy kick in the direction of Michelle's shin; she took a step back, shooting Erin a sly smile.

"Nah, I know you only have dick for one girl,” Michelle said, grinning at Clare as well. Clare just made a face at her. “And at least Jenny Joyce didn't take it, I suppose," Michelle said. “Every silver lining, every cloud, that kind of thing. She looked well pissed about it, did you see her storming off?”

They all had, and they’d seen Aisling running after her, clutching the disco ball in her arms with its cord snaking across the floor and tripping up mall-going mammies all over the place. Pretty amazing. Erin took Clare’s hand again, because she could. She could and she didn’t have to feel bad or weird or anything but pretty damn ecstatic about it; she stroked her thumb across its back. In order from left to right, Michelle’s face looked self-congratulatory, James’s face looked indulgent, and Orla’s face just looked like she’d always known this was going to happen so why had it taken so long?

“Also,” Clare added, “I talked to Charlene Kavanagh just to say congratulations and no hard feelings and so on and it turns out that the cash prize actually _was_ a voucher prize. So we didn’t even miss out on very much.”

“I knew it!” said Michelle. “Those fuckers.”

Only Orla looked anything close to dismayed: “I really could have done with some of that. But,” she said, considering, “at least I got a bucket out of it.”

“As the great Shakespeare once said,” Erin said, “all’s well that ends well in love and war.” She punctuated the line with a squeeze of Clare’s hand — at least she had the love bit settled. And if the war bit had ended in Mae and her band placing above them, well, who cared? Erin had gotten the far better end of the deal.

She smiled a slightly shy smile at Clare as they all began to make their way up the long and dangerous escalator so Orla could go to Boots and buy herself a wee knife.


End file.
